Rapid transit routes can’t get bogged down in congestion and still significantly outperform conventional buses. So one thing transit planners need to be sure to address is traffic chokepoints, writes Jarrett Walker today at Human Transit. Walker points to the new RapidRide D line in Seattle, which runs in mixed traffic on the most traffic-choked parts of the route and has so far failed to deliver the promised travel time improvements.

Many other cities have made the mistake of running “rapid” bus routes in mixed traffic at the points where bypassing congestion is most important. And that not only compromises transit performance, it also undermines public confidence in the agency and future improvements, Walker says:

Severely congested chokepoints are generally expensive places to design transit priority for, especially if you’re unwilling to simply take a lane for transit. So we often see BRT projects that are missing where they are most needed. The Boston Silver Line 4-5, like the Los Angeles Silver Line, can get stuck in traffic downtown. New York’s supposed BRT is so compromised that many refuse to call it BRT anymore. Even the world-class Auckland North Shore Busway disappears as it approaches the Harbour Bridge.

Transit agencies sometimes compromise BRT for their own reasons of budget. Issues of boarding time associated with the lack of on-street ticket machines are coming up on RapidRide, as are concerns about reliability arising from the fact that two RapidRide lines are through-routed, transmitting delay from one to the other. These are familiar struggles within transit agencies who are under pressure to spread a product over many corridors and can’t afford to deliver every aspect of the product in all those places. The result runs the risk of becoming symbolic transit; a bright red line appears on the map, but without the investment needed to make good on the promise that the red line implies.

“BRT” is just a way to bid down from real rapid transit. Running some repainted buses on city streets is not BRT.

Larry Littlefield

Serious BRT requires exclusive rights of way and grade separation, at least at major intersections with signal priority elsewhere. Detroit, as it embarks on a BRT network, needs to keep that in mind. I’m willing to bet the City of has excess capacity in its freeways. If some part of some of them can be repurposed, then perhaps they can get real BRT.

David

No but calling it BRT allows the pols to claim they are doing something, feed money to vendors/contractors, but not disturbs their (presumed) auto centric backers. The chokepoints are where the exclusive lanes, queue jumps, and all of the other features are most needed.

http://twitter.com/humantransit Jarrett Walker

My post isn’t so much a criticism of planners as a message to those who propose and frame Bus Rapid Transit projects. A lane across the Ballard Bridge might be impossibly expensive once you take all relevant considerations on board. That isn’t a critique of the planners, but it does raise the question of whether you should be calling this BRT. In many ways, it’s the Federal Transit Administration that needs to think about this, as it is they who often demand that incomplete and in some cases over-compromised projects be called “BRT” as a condition of funding them.

http://twitter.com/humantransit Jarrett Walker

I should also add that the issue I’m raising is really for elected officials who demand a product be “spread out” over many parts of the region, which comes at the expense of being implemented at a sufficient level of quality. Los Angeles has seen this pattern over and over, with both the Metro Rapid and DASH products.

Bolwerk

That Serious BRT is Serious money for a stunted transit system. Things akin to NYC’s SelectBus make sense sometimes, but polluting the built environment with grade separated busways is really, really silly.

I guess it could make sense in Detroit though. Maybe they already have the grade separation anyway. But then, near their highways are probably the least desirable places to live.

Anonymous

Completely agree… the Silver Line in Boston has semi-exclusive lanes (shared with right turns, parking maneuvers, and – it being Boston – double parked vehicles) in the parts of Washington Street where it doesn’t matter, and not where it is crucially needed (in Dudley Square and between Tufts Medical and Downtown Xing). Who cares if you can get from Mass Av to the Pike in an exclusive bus lane if you sit in traffic for 15 minutes after that to connect to the Orange or Green Line?

Walker is right; the FTA has been driving the, um, bus, so to speak, on this issue. My sense is that in the rush to get “BRT demonstration projects” up and running, people lost sight of what BRT should actually be. Buses in mixed traffic, even with signal priority, is not BRT. Waiting for people to fumble for change because there’s no prepayment is not BRT.

Anonymous

San Diego’s SANDAG is constructing a “BRT” that does just that … travels in regular streets with no dedicated lanes. It will be subject to traffic and congestion like the rest of us. For $40 million it’s going to take more than a fancy bus to lure more people to transit.

AlecHT

Real BRT means the buses run almost entirely in segregated lanes or on exclusive right-of-way purpose built for them. Real BRT also has stations (not just stops) and a pre-boarding payment system. See Curitiba, Brazil for an example. It does not include bus service predominantly in mixed traffic….that’s called “bus service”, not “BRT”.

U.S.-Americans are right to be suspicious of BRT. It’s typically a give-away to auto and highway interests.

Sandy R.

Probably an unavoidable fact of American politics. Taking an example from Washington’s Metrorail system, a new crosstown, downtown line would be far more valuable to increase system capacity, but the fragmented nature of the political entities (two states, four counties, one independent city and one Federal district) in the D.C. area means emphasis is on outward expansion of the existing train lines (such as the Silver line, which will essentially terminate in a semi-rural area west of Dulles airport). This serves the maximum number of “interests” but not necessarily the maximum number of riders or potential riders.

If we had a more centralized Westminster-type government system it might be different (but then again, maybe it wouldn’t).

Harold

The FTA should come up with a definition as to what constitutes BRT. It should be fairly stringent. Anything that’s too compromised gets called “traditional street-running bus service” (TSR-BS) and planners should not legally be able to call it BRT.

Harold

Exactly, David. I’ve heard arguments that basically go “BRT would be cheaper if we got rid of the stations, exclusive ROW, and used our existing bus fleet”, which is a bit like saying a BMW would be a lot cheaper if it were a Scion.

http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

Mexico City has an impressive BRT line. It seems like the article is spot on — you need to have actual dedicated lanes and stations for it to work.

http://twitter.com/MikeLindblom Michael C. Lindblom

The Seattle City Council considered a $500k study of how to build a transit bridge just east of Ballard, but postponed that work, while proceeding with $2.8 million streetcar preliminary studies in the same corridor.

BRT is by nature symbolic transit. It is too easy to skip infrastructure and make later changes for buses to create social change, as demonstrated by the zero private investment attributed to the Los Angeles Orange Line, often cited as the US’ premier BRT example.
Even when BRT has exclusive right of ways it can still be slow. The Orange Line can take double the time as what was originally planned. Depending on the time of day, the mixed traffic bus route is actually faster. But that doesn’t change the marketing of the Orange Line which is a part of its success.

We should remember that BRT is a bus and any improvement over traditional bus routes may warrant its designation as “rapid”.

Davistrain

“Symbolic Transit”: that term makes me think of “Security Theater”, something that looks impressive, but does little to, in one case, make travel faster, and in the other, make travel safer. At the very least, if a bus line doesn’t have ticket machines at every stop, it shouldn’t be called BRT. If the bus has to remain stopped until all the fare transactions and passenger questions are dealt with, it isn’t “Rapid”. I’m old enough to remember Pacific Electric trolley cars with conductors; passengers got on board, the motorman started the car moving and the conductor collected fares. Much too labor-intensive for today’s world.

Bus transit

A bill of goods from the get-go, with the community and the mayor advocating for light rail which has the virtues of lower emissions (especially the asthma-causing rubber tire pollution), more comfortable ride, faster boarding, and a direct Green Line subway transfer at the historic Boylston St station, yet more powerful interests riding in and mandating ICE technology even in the tunnels.

Bus transit

The original BRT model featured turnstiles. Without some sort of pre-paid fare system (or even POP), it is, indeed, absurd to style one’s express bus “BRT”.

Sparkatus

I understand that adding a conductor adds cost but it also speeds service and avoids additional infrastructure.

I think you are missing something. The NYC subway did not spring up whole hog in an empty city. Previous forms of mass transit permitted increases in density, which then made higher capacity forms of mass transit profitable (or its modern equivalent, reasonably subsidized). And provided the economic base to pay for it.

Horsecar, trolley, elevated, subway.

What does the SIR cover? Perhaps 10 percent of its operating cost, perhaps less. And they didn’t have to build it; it was already there.

If one had a potentially high capacity, uninhibited BRT system with its own ROW, it could be upgraded to rail when demand was sufficient to support multiple unit vehicles on a single corridor.

As for Detroit, if some of those highways were converted to busways/bikeways, they would be less undesirable to live near, and perhaps could be the focus of redevelopment heading out from Downtown.

keenplanner

If it gets stuck in traffic, it’s not BRT.

Erik Griswold

Rodney Slater, the Arkansas Highway Commisioner, then FHWA administrator turned SecUSDOT was a big proponent of BRT and aranged many a junket for politicians to go to Curitiba.

And do a windshield survey and you realize this was just a paint job on some buses (making them separated from the rest of the fleet and thus unmixable?) and some nice new bus shelters…with 30 minute headways outside of M-F peak?

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